CW: References to alcohol consumption, descriptions of blood and violence, references to medical trauma

The night started with a green plastic cup that reminded me of home. It was probably from an old IKEA set. It was alone in the draw between the Dora mugs and chipped custom glasses with someone’s wedding date engraved in the rim, badly scratched out. I weighed the cup up in my hand, and my hand looked tiny—child-like—compared to it. I could hear my mother’s voice when I looked at it. Telling me to be careful, to make sure I didn’t spill anything. But instead of milk or juice, I filled it to the brim with vodka and whatever mixer was within reach. A few drinks like that before it ended up abandoned on the table of half-eaten pizza and bowls of stale chips.

A big swollen green thumb sticking out amid the mess. I hadn’t finished the last drink, jumping at the opportunity to trade that all-too-nostalgic feeling of plastic for a glass bottle. Wringing their necks like an angry man.

When we got up on the tables to dance, someone kicked it over, and I knew it would stain the wood. Like a metronome, it dripped steadily in the middle of the table as we sang, drank, smoked, and danced. The drip, drip, drip, drip taunted me. Until I took another shot and turned the music up. Then I was smiling again, and all thoughts of that green cup were gone.

I bruised my hand tossing punches at a pole in the corner. I could feel the skin on my knuckles splitting, but it just egged me on. Let it out. Someone said. Let it all out.

The boy I used to fancy was there, talking about some new love He was waiting on while we shared a cigarette—my lips locking around the ghost of His. When I got drunk enough that I ran off to lay in the middle of a garden, He was the one to come after me. There was a time I prayed for that, for Him to come after me. To care. But those prayers had been abandoned. Just another green cup—left to spill when something new and shinier came along. Something that’d get me drunker.

He was sober. I wasn’t. He kept asking me about how I’ve been, He hadn’t seen me in months. I didn’t know how to tell Him I’ve never been better, but I’ve never been worse. He told me my friends were concerned. Coward. I wanted to spit in His face. Own your concern. I couldn’t look at Him. I don’t want to talk about it. That wasn’t really true. I wanted to talk about it. Of course, I wanted to talk about it. I just didn’t want to talk to Him about it. Not while I was drunk enough to forget, and He was sober and would remember.

He must have sprinkled water on my head to make me present my neck. To look like I agreed. And He must have brought a knife, He must have held it to my nicely presented throat and ordered my tongue to speak. He must have sliced me open and let it bleed out of me, let it spill onto the grass and He must have asked the flowers that bloomed there what happened to me. It all must have spilled out at some point because the next thing I knew, He was comforting me as I stared up at the stars. And as the bloody flowers tickled my arms, I could see the earth moving. Spinning. I could see what generations of physicists could only dream of. He told me it was the vodka talking, but he wasn’t looking at the moon. He didn’t see how it smiled at me.

I didn’t see Him again, after that. After He pulled me to my feet and brushed the grass from my back and I didn’t turn back to look at my blood or at the flowers or the moon. I wrapped my fingers around the neck of another bottle and my lips around another cigarette and let myself forget.

But it’s not as easy to forget. Not anymore. Because almost instantly I found myself wrapped up in my girlfriend’s arms beneath a window, confessing. I blamed it all on that boy I used to love and the disease that broke my sister down in front of me. Because you’re not allowed too just be sad anymore. Someone shoved a glass in my hand. Water, that time. Part of a nicely kept set. And I couldn’t take it. I told them I didn’t want to break it. I didn’t want to break it, and I didn’t want to cut my fingers on the glass. I wanted the plastic cup back. I wanted it to be filled with milk or juice or soft drink if my mum said I was allowed.

I spent most of the night sitting with my bleeding hands locked with a girl who I was always too afraid to speak to. I spewed a collection of apologies, and she just squeezed my hand, not minding the blood, and slit her own palm open. In that drunken, hazed, delusional state I found what I’d been looking for at the bottom of bottles. Not quite solace, not just the comfort of friendship… And even when a boy walked over and asked who broke my heart, when I choked on the words, that girl looked him dead in the eyes and convinced him we weren’t bleeding.

We squeezed each other’s hands hard enough, supplied enough pressure, that we both stopped bleeding for just a moment.